Sunday, February 5, 2017

Irish Links to Cuba

Visit Cuba to discover its Irish,

Celtic and Irish-American heritage

O’Reilly Street (Havana)

“Two island peoples in the same sea of
struggle and hope. Cuba and Ireland”

·Irish wild geese and their descendants played military
and economic roles in Spain’s colonial expansion in the 17th and 18th
centuries, symbolized today by O’Reilly
Street and the O’Farrill Hotel
in Old Havana.

·Cubans say that Father
Felix Varela “taught us to think” before Spain exiled him to New York in
1823 for his advocacy of independence and abolition.He became the advocate of the immigrant Irish,
Vicar General of the Diocese in 1837 and is currently being considered for sainthood.

·Irish Americans in the mid-19th century built Cuban
railroads, served as engineers in its sugar mills, created schools, organized
the first labor action repressed by Spanish colonial authorities and were
executed for support of slave rebellions and independence.

·Charles
Blakely from Charleston was Cuba’s
first mulatto dentist (Black mother, Irish-American father).He was arrested in 1844 by Capitán General Leopoldo O´Donnell as the Havana leader
of the Escalera slave rebellion.

·A young Cuban artist fleeing the Spanish draft met his
Irish immigrant wife in New York in the 1870s.After his death, their young son Eamon
de Valera was sent to Ireland, becoming a leader of the Easter rising and
President.

·

New York’s “Dynamite
Johnny” O’Brien ran guns to Cuban nationalists in the 1890s.He was honored in both countries, becoming Chief Havana
Harbor Pilot and captaining the battleship Maine to its resinking in 1912. (A plaque honoring Dynamite Johnny can be found
on the Avenida de Puerto, 15 feet from the entrance to the Plaza de Armas, walking
toward the cruise terminal and Plaza San Francisco.)

·Sons of
Irish women from New Orleans and Philadelphia, Julio A. Mella McPartland and Antonio Guiteras Holmes, were nationalist
leaders killed for their resistance to the dictator Machado in the 1930s.

·A memorial for the 1981 Hunger Strikers was dedicated in Havana by Sinn Fein President
Gerry Adams to mark the 20th anniversary.He revisited the site in 2015, praising the leadership shown by Cuban and US leaders
in moving towards an end to decades of hostility between the two countries.

·New York University’s Mick
Moloney and the Green Fields of
America performed in Havana in 2014 and 2015 with the support of the US and Irish embassies, joined by local
Celtic musicians whose ancestors immigrated from Asturia and Galecia.In November 2017 they performed together in Holguin and Santiago.

More on the Irish connection can be read here http://tinyurl.com/IrishCubanHistory

An Irish Walking Tour of Old Havana http://tinyurl.com/irishwalk

Join us in Cuba for a licensed historical and cultural people to
people program